Mentor physician, family bound for El Salvador to conduct clinic for poor, isolated people in the mountain jungle

Mentor physician Paul Vanek will be joining a medical and humanitarian mission to El Salvador next month with eight other Northeast Ohioans to work in a medical clinic and dig and construct latrines. Behind Vanek are his photographs of wildlife on a 2012 trip to Africa.

Around here, it’s his Mentor plastic surgery practice for which Dr. Paul Vanek is best known. But the physician also is a board-certified trauma physician and chief of surgical staff for Lake Health.
He’s also an empathetic citizen of the world who uses his medical skills in humanitarian efforts to help those less fortunate. He traveled to Haiti after the 2011 earthquake and to El Salvador to work with the Cleveland Catholic Diocese’s mission there, run by Sister Rose Elizabeth Terrell.
He’s headed back to Central America in a few weeks and is seeking donations to assist with purchases of what he and his team will need.
To him, the humanitarian work a no-brainer.
“I can stay home and talk about the problems of the world or engage my talents and gifts in the service of others,” he said.
He’ll be making his second visit to the tiny country of El Salvador, one of the most dangerous and corrupt in Central America. There he’ll work in a medical clinic set up in a mountainside mission run by an Ursuline nun who was a good friend to the four sisters martyred there in 1980. One of those women, Sister Dorothy Kazel, another Ursuline nun, is interred in All Souls Cemetery in Chardon Township. The Rev. Thomas Johns, pastor St. John Vianney in Mentor, worked with Kazel in 1976 when he was a seminary student.
Vanek knows the story well. He was 18 when the four Cleveland nuns were taken to the hills outside the airport near San Salvador by members of the El Salvador National Guard and were then beaten, raped and murdered. It was just months after Archbishop Oscar Romero had been assassinated as he said Mass in the city. When the bishop of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese came for the archbishop’s funeral he asked the Cleveland mission team if they wanted to leave. El Salvador was embroiled in a vicious 12-year civil war, and even the Peace Corps had withdrawn. But the Cleveland sisters had been there since 1964 and the nuns told Bishop James Hickey they wanted to stay.
Vanek, who has been a parishioner at St. Mary of the Assumption in Mentor since 1996, will visit the Chapel of the Cleveland Martyrs when he and eight other Northeast Ohioans arrive in El Salvador in mid-February.
“It’s built on the site of the shallow grave where the women’s bodies were found a few days after they were killed,” he said.
Vanek will work in a clinic along with a native doctor to perform medical procedures not available to those living in the mountainside jungle region of Chiltiupan. His daughter, Elizabeth, and wife, Kristine, will also be part of the mission trip, along with members of two other Northeast Ohio families who help subsidize an El Salvador school.
“Elizabeth is an artist, and she’s collecting CD-ROMs to make into bird-shaped mirrors for the children,” he said. “They don’t even have mirrors, and many of them have never seen their own faces.”
Elizabeth is 17 and a Mentor High junior.
The nine Northeast Ohioans also will dig latrines for 30 families during their four-day visit.
Because airline regulations limit each passenger to 50 pounds of cargo, the group is seeking donations which they’ll add to their own funds to purchase basic products such as diapers, antibiotics and dental hygiene items in San Salvador.
“The country is so corrupt that prices are very high, but Sister Rose Elizabeth has good connections and is very well-organized,” he said. “She’ll take us to places where we’re safe and will get quality purchases.”
His own suitcases will be filled with prenatal vitamins and small-sized women’s underwear — items the mission has told them aren’t readily available in El Salvador.
“So many of the medical conditions we see are things due to poor nutrition,” he said. “They are things never seen by doctors in this country, where people are so much healthier and eat better.”
Corn is a major element of diets there, but its quality and nutrition are poor, he said.
Most Salvadorians live on about $2 a day, cook on open wood fires, and are without electricity or running water.
“People in El Salvador have far fewer resources and are much less educated than Americans,” Vanek said. “Last time I was there some people walked for more than seven hours just to reach the clinic. We don’t have Facebook or anything to let them know about the clinic, and there are no roads or even paths for a donkey.”
Vanek isn’t deterred in his humanitarian efforts by hardships, the primitive conditions or even the danger.
He drew inspiration from his mother, who always made a point of helping others despite her own hardships.
“I was 8 when my father sustained a brain injury after falling off a ladder. He was never the same after that and could never work again,” he recalled. “I’m the middle child of five, and my young mother not only took care of all of us, but always reached out to raise money to help others.”
He thinks his choice of a career in medicine was deeply influenced by those early experiences.
“I recall never knowing what would happen, and to me the physicians always seemed to know what to do,” Vanek said. “They were a resource of comfort in my world of uncertainty. Those experiences led me to decide as a child to be a part of the solutions for other people.”

Donations for the medical and humanitarian mission to El Salvador can be mailed or delivered before Feb. 11 to Vanek Plastic Surgery, Suite 100, 9485 Mentor Ave., Mentor, OH 44060.

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